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In light of the uprisings in the Arab world and the demand for employment opportunities for young Arabs, we would like to present you our Snack Report that concludes our findings after reading many researches on young people’s perspectives and aspiration in 2010 across the Middle East and North African countries.

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Well, most of the junior- and small-businesses as well as young entrepreneurs face the challenge of getting paid on time after finishing the project. Our friends at Wamda released today a new episode of the “Mini-Entrepreneur” featuring 3antar-preneur chasing payment after gettting his first job for his venture. While the client has agreed to pay, check out now how long will it take him to receive the payment?

Wamda is a newly established Entrepreneurial Support platform by Abraaj Capital and its subsidiary Riyada Enterprise Development, aims at inspiring, empowering and connecting the entrepreneurial ecosystem across the MENA region –the platform was launched in a mega “Celebration of Entrepreneurship” event in November 2010.

You can watch the video here since they didn’t upload it as yet to Youtube.

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This article written by our CEO, Tarek Kassar, and originally published today on interactiveME.com.

I wanted to drop my comment on the debate that is happening today on- and off-Facebook in regards to the effectiveness of boycotting facebook. The call to boycot facebook is in response to the fact that Facebook repeatedly removed 3 Palestinian Intifada pages and the day of effect was supposed to be today, April 10th.

Well, it’s quite obvious that Mark Zuckerberg and his friends have done a nasty job by continuously removing any Intifada page attracting friends. From his perspective, I believe he acted clever because of the Israeli lobby. He is basically running the 3rd largest country in the world and acting as a President with a western agenda. But do you think it’s clever to boycott Facebook for a day and make a difference?

Let’s be realistic, fact-based, and rational.

According to the latest Facebook MENA statistics report we wrote, we were around 21,000,000 out of 500,000,000 facebook users. This means that if the whole Arab world, every Arab Facebook user, decided to boycott Facebook, Facebook would only lose 4.5 percent of its user-base. To put things into perspectives, Facebook is growing 5 times more than this percentage annually. So, if you leave the Facebook world, somebody else is filling your place anyway.

For those who were campaigning to boycott Facebook (like 123), I don’t think it made any significant impact on the Arab Facebook users today nor on Mark Zuckerbery.

So “WE” missed the call and not “Mark Zuckerberg”.

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April 10, 2011

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Today, we’re happily launching the new interactiveME.com, an interactive, social media portal that has been covering the region since 2009. This website has been revamped twice and, this time, it took the shape of a real portal with a blog twist where this brand should have actually been positioned. We worked on design tweaks, functionalities changes, and content structure alterations and now it’s live on www.interactiveME.com.

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March 1, 2011

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Position Summary: The Growth Manager is a replacement title for “Business Development Manager” who is responsible for all sales and marketing activities of the agency and implementing the business development plan, which includes: prospecting, lead generation and qualification, presentation development and follow-up.

Major Requirements/ Responsibilities:

Develops/updates new sales literature.

Enhances the agency website with creative samples.

Manages/develops an electronic presentation piece.

Researches and creates opportunities to pitch new accounts.

Understands the business and marketing challenges of key prospects.

Builds relationships between agency and key prospects.

Works to build prospects/contacts through existing clients.

Develops sales strategies for key prospects.

Develops and maintains a prime prospect list which includes qualified prospects from the financial, high tech, health care, travel and tourism, telecommunications, package goods, consumer and retail arenas.

Manages/keeps regular contact with companies on the prospect list.

Organizes, directs and makes physical arrangements for presentations.

Develops responses to requests for proposals (RFPs).

Benefits:

Working Hours: 9:00 am – 5:00 pm (Friday & Saturday OFF).

Salary: Disclosed only after screening + bonus offered.

Devices: Blackberry Curve / Macbook Air.

State-of-the-art Tools: “Basecamp” for project collaboration and “Highrise” for contact management both integrated to your blackberry.

Lunch: Every Friday lunch is on the house.

Social Contribution: Get 10% of your time at work to develop your own social contribution to the society.

Health Insurance: Included and starts after passing the 3-month probationary period.

Location:

At our headquaters in Beirut, Lebanon + frequent travel across the MENA region.

HOW TO APPLY:

Please send us an email at tk@youngberryagency.com with subject line: CV – Growth Manager. Or you can update your profile on linkedin.com and send us a link.

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2010 has been the starting year for Youngberry, even if we’re not officially done with the papers as yet.

We are grateful for all the questions, ideas, feedback and thoughts you have sent our way. They have really helped us develop our concept and hone our development path for 2011 and beyond. It has been a privilege to have such a brilliant community from early on.

There will be new exciting local services and partnerships popping out of Youngberry labs, as we move to encompass the youth community regionally. We are setting our sails for the big picture and strive for greater goals. We are glad to have such strong support from everyone who wants to see a change the kind of change youth desire. That’s our greater goal.

We want to thank all of you who have supported us in many different ways for the past couple of months this year. This will be a long and interesting journey.

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We started our day by smashing open an apartment door in order to grab Toufic from his deep sleep. We have pictures but we refrain from showing them due to our censorship policy on this blog. Toufic said that would be weird and asked for privacy.

We can tell him now since he hasn’t serve in the army: There is no privacy in boot camp habibi, there’s a group shower time instead. So we asked him get ready in 10 minutes: shaved, equipped, and set.

To warm him up, we took him immediately to Hamra’s busiest street and served him the first meal of the day – 1 thing to eat and 1 thing to drink.

We decided to camp for the next 6 hours at a nice cozy and comfortable place in Hamra – Caribou Cafe. A quiet place only a few people enjoying the weather and drinking their hot coffee or tea.

We asked Toufic about his expectations in regards to what he wants to achieve from the 4-day boot camp, wrote it on the whiteboard and we started with the A, B, C ‘s.

Now, it’s lunch time and we are very punctual so we need to stop blogging.

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Tarek Kassar spoke at a Refresh Qatar community event at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar. The presentation title was “Startup Battlefield – Research on Aspiring Entrepreneurs” and was based on research we have done internally about the state of aspiring entrepreneurs (people who desire to start a business in the next 12 months) in the MENA region.The presentation design theme was all about “Boxing Fight”.

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December 2, 2010

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Our operations manager at Youngberry believes that part of good performance and effectiveness on the job is having a good pair of shoes. Enough talking in the third-person, it feels too corporate. I wanted to share with you my recommendation for a good brand and model that I just bought for myself, Converse Chuck Taylor model of blue jeans color for $47 only. Please send your congratulation mails to my shoes box P.O.Box.

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December 1, 2010

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We are renovating our website and this blog is meant to entertain and update everyone visiting us during this period of time. The website is expected to be launched during the first week of January 2011. Until then, please don’t die since we’re keen to show it to you first.

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